What the Land Around Dholera Actually Grows

This page tells you which crops the villages around Dholera named as their most important, counted across all seventy two of them. It matters because it is the plainest description available of what this land was doing before anyone called it a smart city, and because the manufacturing column is completely empty.

What this ranking is

The Census asks every village to name its three most important agricultural commodities. All 72 villages in and around Dholera SIR answered, and between them they named nine crops. Nine is a short list, and a short list is what we publish. There is no honest way to stretch it.

This is the last time anybody counted these villages one by one and published the answer. The Census of India sent enumerators to every village in the country in 2011 and asked the same questions everywhere, which is what makes the answers comparable. The amenity questions were asked in 2009. That is old, and we say so on every figure, but it is the only complete, uniform and free record of what was on the ground before the industrial city arrived. If you want to understand what Dholera SIR was built on top of, this is the baseline.

None of this describes 2026. Roads have been built, land has changed hands and the expressway has opened since the surveyors came. Read it as the starting line, not the current score.

What the land actually grows

Wheat was named by 71 of the 72 villages and cotton by 68. Green gram, the pulse most people call moong, was named by 46. After that the numbers fall away quickly: sesame and bajra were named by eight villages each, rice by seven, cumin by six, and paddy and mustard by one village each.

Two crops and a pulse, on land that mostly has no irrigation. That is a rain fed rotation, and it explains why the land here was cheap long before anybody drew a city on it.

Census of India 2011, village directory. The amenity questions were surveyed in 2009. These are not current conditions and this site never presents them as current conditions.

The finding nobody prints: no manufacturing at all

The Census asks the same question about manufactured goods and about handicrafts. Every one of the 72 villages left both columns blank. Not one village named a single manufactured commodity or a single handicraft in 2011.

That blank is the most useful thing on this page. The industrial base being built at Dholera is not being added to an existing industrial base. It is being started from nothing, on farmland that grew wheat and cotton and no manufactured goods whatsoever. Whether you read that as opportunity or as risk is your call, but the starting point is not in doubt.

Village by village

Census of India 2011, village directory. The amenity questions were surveyed in 2009. These are not current conditions and this site never presents them as current conditions.

How to use this without being misled

Crop mix is a soil and water signal. Wheat and cotton on unirrigated land in the Bhal means a single main season and a hard summer. It does not tell you what any plot is worth, and we would not pretend otherwise. For the official valuation, read the rate pages, which print the 2011 stamp duty rates by village and by survey number.